With the proliferation of computers and the advent of the Internet, and in particular, the maturing of the World Wide Web (“web”), real-time conversations between conversation participants via their computer systems are becoming increasingly common. These conversations, which take place virtually over computer networks, are ever replacing the traditional face-to-face meetings.
Collaboration systems, such as MICROSOFT LIVE MEETING, are increasingly being used to conduct these virtual meetings between potentially geographically distributed people. In a typical scenario, a meeting organizer schedules a virtual meeting with a collaboration service server, and provides a list of people who are expected to participate in the scheduled virtual meeting. The meeting organizer then sends each of the expected participants an invitation inviting the participant to attend the virtual meeting at the scheduled time.
These collaboration systems allow for the sharing of resources during a virtual meeting. For example, a meeting participant can share documents by uploading copies of the documents into the meeting. While the meeting participants are able to view the shared documents, a difficulty arises when a meeting participant tries to make an edit to the shared document. Because only a copy of the document was loaded into the meeting, any changes to the shared document are only made to the copy of the document and not reflected in the original copy of the document.